Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speakers: Michael Banck, Margarita Manterola, Martin Krafft
The classic kickstarting session of every DebConf.

Speaker: Andi Barth
This talk describes how the core debian package infrastructure parts work together, that is ftp archive, buildds, release scripts (including but not limited to "how did it evolve")

Speaker: Olly Betts
Debian uses Xapian-powered search extensively, both in the software we package and in our own infrastructure. I'd like to share some thoughts on these different searches, where they work well, where they don't, and how we can improve them.

Speaker: Bradley M. Kuhn
Debian is among the oldest GNU/Linux distributions still active today. A community-led project with democratically elected leadership, Debian remains a shining example of a project that serves developers and users rather than for profit interests and wealthy trade associations that so commonly control and manipulate Open Source projects today. Debian culture embodies the ethos of software freedom and the tradition of enthusiasts and hobbyists (rather than businesses) directing the future of Free Software projects. As an independent observer and Debian user, in this keynote, I will examine the reasons why these principles have served Debian well, considered early decisions that Debian made that have assured a commitment to principle, explore how Debian can continue to help everyone, introduce future collaborations that might succeed in helping Debian in its goals, and discuss the unique role Debian can play in advancing software freedom.

Speaker: Norvald H. Ryeng
MySQL 5.7 contains more new functionality and improvements than any previous release. Some of these changes were made specifically to make packaging of MySQL and software that uses MySQL easier, often based on input from package maintainers in Debian and other distros. Join us for a tour of packaging improvements and challenges, and how we work with these topics upstream.

Speaker: Raphaël Hertzog
Almost anybody will acknowledge that maintaining 18000 software packages secure over 5 years is a challenge and even more so in the context of Debian where most volunteers tend to skip the parts that are not fun. Still the story of the Debian LTS team shows that it is possible. This talk will explain how we got started and where we are today.

Speaker: Daniel Pocock
Is there a genuinely free alternative to Skype, or is there hope that we can create one? This talk provides an introduction to Free Real-Time Communications technologies, including SIP, XMPP and WebRTC, the possibilities with free software and why this is important.

Speaker: Jan-Marek Glogowski
Technically started in 2005, Munich's LiMux project was officially and successfully finished in 2013; albeit with a long delay, compared to our initial project plan, as much more work croped up. Nevertheless the work on our Linux client(s) continues. New releases get rolled out, bugs get fixed and new features are implemented to improve the client, adapt it to the changing needs of the municipal IT, and support our users. This talk will put the spotlight on the current situation and does a quick glance on the history, the technical tools used to manage our 33 000 users and 18 000 clients and a little future outlook.

Speakers: Bdale Garbee, Didier Raboud, Andi Barth, Steve Langasek, Keith Packard
An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at Debconf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues with the committee.

Speakers: Enrico Zini, Francesca Ciceri
A bof especially targeted at DebConf first timers, from DebConf old timers. What to expect, how to communicate effectively, how to get the most from this experience.

Speaker: Bdale Garbee
Invited talk by Bdale Garbee

Speaker: Matthias Klumpp
AppStream is a metadata-enhancement project for both Linux distributions and upstream projects which develop for Linux. It allows upstreams to provide distributors with a machine-readable description of an application or generic software package, links to screenshots and websites and several other useful metadata. It also allows projects to assign a unique identifier to their software, which allows other software to find it in the distribution's package repositories. AppStream also is the basis for new exciting projects, like automatic UEFI firmware updates. The first half of the talk will go into detail about why we need AppStream, and the work which was done to integrate it with Debian. The second half of the talk will give an overview on the current plans to change the way software is distributed on Linux. Traditionally upstream software is packaged by a downstream Linux distributor and then released as a Linux distribution. Currently, work is going on on solutions to allow projects to distribute their software directly to the end user, as well as for sandboxing the 3rd-party software and isolating it from the rest of the system. I will give a brief introduction on the Limba and XdgApp approaches to the software-distribution issue, and what we at Debian should prepare for in future.

Speaker: Werner Koch
Invited talk by Werner Koch

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
I've written up my "preferred packaging" techniques at https://wiki.debian.org/DanielKahnGillmor/preferred_packaging -- I'd like to briefly present them in person, with a projector to show how I work with the tools and how i investigate a package's revision history this way.

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Big changes are afoot in the world of OpenPGP and GnuPG as well. The Debian GnuPG packaging team will present some of the changes we have in store, what they might mean for other parts of the infrastructure, and how our operating system can make use of the new features.

Speaker: Nolan Leake
Cumulus Linux is a Debian derivative distribution that runs on Network Switches. This talk will introduce the distribution and its use cases, as well as discuss our relationship with Debian and other upstream projects.

Speaker: Markus Frosch
We try to explain some of the problems Nagios has had for years, what the differences to Icinga are, and how Icinga 2 can ease up monitoring in small, as well as really big environments. Most sysadmins have a love-hate relationship with Nagios based monitoring solutions. Backed by a sizable community, users have learned to live with it’s shortcomings in scaling, configuration, and modern integration options. Taking advantage of the tremendous number of supported hard- and software, Icinga leaves all legacy limitations behind. It delivers an easily scalable solution, with clustering, load balancing, automated replication, and even business process monitoring out-of-the-box. Based on a new configuration format with advanced language features - like conditional processing and complex type support - monitoring agile environments works like a breeze. Existing modules for Puppet, Chef and Ansible ramp up the rollout time and ensure a continuous and up to date monitoring environment. The talk will demonstrate how popular tools such as Graphite, Logstash, or Graylog integrate better and easier than ever before. In addition to that we’ll introduce the new Icinga Web 2 interface and give a brief introduction into the technical architecture. Icinga is shipped with Debian for years now, and we brought Icinga 2 into Debian just after its first stable release, which is know included in Jessie. I will show you the safe and most recent update channels for your environment.

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
Show off your project! NB: It will be mandatory to set up your laptop before the session, in order to assure a smooth transition between speakers.

Speaker: Jon 'maddog' Hall
This talk will discuss two contests with two issues. First contest: Inveneo, LeMaker and ARM have sponsored a contest to develop a solar-powered, highly available, scalable, passively cooled "Micro Data Center" for developing countries. The first part of the contest was to develop a design for the hardware that would use up to 15 ARM-based Single Board Computers (SBCs) and up to ten SSDs with a 16-port Gbit data switch that could be powered by a Solar Panel or other 12 volt supply. Over fifty entries were submitted to a contest ending June 10th, with the results being announced July 20th. Some number of the winning Micro Data Center designs will be built by a company called ProCase. Then a second part of the contest will be to create and configure the software to run these data centers in a secure, highly available, easily updated fashion. The speaker would like the Debian community, spear-headed by Debian developers at Debconf, to create such a package of software. Second Contest: Linaro, a non-profit organization trying to help companies put GNU/Linux on their ARM processors and SoCs, has noticed about 1400 programs in GNU/Linux that still have assembly language in them. This assembly language has often been there a long time, and may (in the days of multi-core, multi-pipelined, multi-level cache) cause the programs to run slower and less efficiently, not faster. Examples of these performance and efficiency issues will be briefly given in the talks. Linaro has designed a contest to port these 1400 programs to ARM-64, and at the same time test to see if the programs efficiency can be improved by recoding the assembly language sections. These contests will be discussed in the talk, perhaps with workshops set up to help address them at Debconf.

Speaker: Ricardo Mones
The unbelievable story of a team committed to make you to work less so Debian can be better.

Speaker: Samuel Thibault
This will give a brief update on the progress of the GNU/Hurd port in the past few years.

Speaker: Michael Prokop
How would it be to just commit your packaging changes to the version control system and get automated Q/A tests plus Debian packages for different releases without any further manual work required? This is what we're doing for a company who relies 100% on Debian packages. The OpenStack project jenkins-job-builder allows us to manage more than 800 Jenkins jobs through a few YAML configuration files without touching the Jenkins web interface. jenkins-debian-glue takes care of Debian package builds, building on cowbuilder, lintian, piuparts and autopkgtest. Code review using Gerrit as well as configuration management (Puppet + Ansible) helps us control the workflow and infrastructure. All the involved software is open source and in this talk I'll provide an overview how such a system can look like, how you might benefit for your own project and which challenges you might face.

Speaker: Ben Hutchings
The Linux kernel is under rapid development. Stable releases are made around 5 times per year, each including many new features and support for new hardware. This talk will summarise the features that have been added and enabled in the last year. There have been many changes to Linux between 3.16 and 4.1. Some of these will require new or updated userland applications to take advantage of them. I will attempt to summarise the most interesting changes and the state of integration in Debian.

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
A tutorial on how to implement functional testing in your packages using the DEP-8 standard (a.k.a autopkgtest) in a way that the Debian CI will automatically run it for you. I will explain the foundations of the DEP-8 spec, how to run tests on your own development box, commons tips and tricks for writing tests (e.g. how to run the upstream test suite), and present several examples from packages in the archive.

Speaker: Joshua Powers
A year after visiting DebConf14 the HP's hLinux team would like to present on a few of the efforts, lessons learned, and direction of hLinux. We also want to solicit feedback. Presented by Joshua Powers (HP).

Speaker: Ian Jackson
dgit is a tool which allows you to dgit clone any package in Debian, and get a git tree. You can work on the package in git, and when you are ready do dgit build and dgit push to upload. Other dgit users see your git history. dgit is particularly useful for NMUers and downstreams.

Speaker: Carsten Schönert
The talk will give an compressed overview on the current state of Icedove and related packages, the work of the maintainers on Icedove in the last years, current problems and issues, also a short overview about the future planes for Icedove in Debian.

Speaker: Michael Banck
Both Debian squeeze and the PostgreSQL version it ships with (8.4) were discontinued in Summer 2014. To support squeeze-lts, credativ GmbH has maintained a LTS branch of PostgreSQL 8.4, backpatching applicable changes from the next-younger branch (9.0). So far, three releases have been made on the same day or shortly after the official point releases by the PostgreSQL community. Those releases were then uploaded to squeeze-lts. This short talk will present the PostgreSQL-LTS effort, which policies were set and what problems we had during the project.

Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont
This year's GSoC students have worked on various projects all summer, and DebConf is a great opportunity for them to present a summary and let the community look at their work. The full program will be published in due time, but we expect around six short presentations.

Speaker: Riku Voipio
The standard method for installing Debian is using debian-installer. However, there is considerable demand for ready Debian images for a large range of purposes. People want computers pre-installed with debian, live CD's for demos, cloud images for virtual machines, sd-card images for embedded boards. There is also growing interest in non-bootable images for containers. Debian main archive carries almost a dozen different tools for creating images - and outside debian there are dozens of others. All tools tend to use debootstrap as their, base, and add a bunch of common things on top - typically set up partition, filesystem, bootloader, default user and credentials, and possibly a custom kernel. This talk explores the available methods and their use cases. I intend to look if there is room for consolidation in image creation tools, and how improve the quality and safety of prebuilt Debian images floating in the internet.

Speaker: David Kalnischkies
Package management is a solved problem. Everyone knows how it works, nothing ever changes and there are enormous teams maintaining the tools involved which many people use and complain about everyday. In short: Fun is to be had elsewhere - or is it? Confessions of an apt developer about the past, present and future of APT, the super cow powers in it and why you might want to care.

Speakers: Holger Levsen, Lunar
With free software, anyone can inspect the source code for malicious flaws. But Debian provide binary packages to its users. The idea of “deterministic” or “reproducible” builds is to empower anyone to verify that no flaws have been introduced during the build process by reproducing byte-for-byte identical binary packages from a given source. This talk will explain the current status of the Debian Reproducible Builds project, how this is relevant for the complete free software eco system and how you can contribute. see https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds and https://reproducible.debian.net URLs: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds https://reproducible.debian.net

Speaker: Paul Wise
A panel bringing together different representatives of Debian and our derivatives. We will introduce represented derivatives, discuss their relationships with Debian, what they need from Debian, what Debian needs from them and strategies for integration. People who are interested in joining the panel are explicitly invited to contact me.

Speaker: Alexander Wirt
This talk wants to give an overview about the current state of affairs about lists.debian.org. Where are we? - some statistics - problems - features not everyone is familiar with Where do we want to go to? - DMARC - Spamhandling - We need help - New search frontend - Other planned Improvements

Speaker: Wookey
ARM needs to test toolchain fixes, and 'all of debian' is a good way of finding whether your fix works 'everywhere', and how likely a particular code sequence is. This talk describes how we set the build system up to rebuild everything as quickly as possible, and shows the results we got. Feedback from others doing this sort of thing would be appreciated.

Speaker: Christian Boltz
AppArmor is an effective and easy-to-use Linux application security system. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats, even zero-day attacks, by enforcing good behavior and preventing even unknown application flaws from being exploited. AppArmor security policies, called profiles, completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges. A number of default profiles are included with AppArmor, and using a combination of advanced static analysis and learning-based tools, AppArmor profiles for even very complex applications can be deployed successfully in a matter of hours. This talk gives an introduction to AppArmor. I'll show the AppArmor tools to create and update profiles and also explain the profile syntax so that you can understand and manually edit profiles. I'll also show some advanced usage - securing a typical webserver, setting up read-only root access to do backups and how to (ab)use AppArmor for debugging.

Speaker: Niels Thykier
The Release Team will be reflecting on the Jessie and the Stretch release cycle.

Speaker: Emmanuel Kasper
Vagrant: on demand virtual machines for every day use Vagrant is a command line tools which allow you to create, manage, script, and share VMs with a single command. In this talk we will quickly demo: * share a ready to use development environment. Example for Mediawiki development, Datascience, Crosscompilation for Atari ST * how to use Vagrant to deploy VMs to a cloud platform cf https://github.com/telcat/vagrant-proxmox

Speaker: Steve SCHNEPP
With Munin, we are lucky to have very nice packager relationships, specially with Debian. It has several advantages, but also some hidden drawbacks. This is to list & help addressing them.

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
Show off your project! NB: It will be mandatory to set up your laptop before the session, in order to assure a smooth transition between speakers.

Speaker: Christoph Berg
While the Debian archive only contains a single PostgreSQL version per distribution, upstreams supports five concurrent branches plus the devel/beta versions. The apt.postgresql.org repository extends the Debian packaging of the PostgreSQL server packages to cover the full cross product of all branches times seven Debian and Ubuntu releases times currently two architectures. On top of that, various PostgreSQL extension packages are built. This talk is about the lessons learned while maintaining this package set and how automated testing helps to ensure high quality. Ingredients are pg_regress, jenkins, jenkins-debian-glue, autopkgtest, dpkg and reprepro tweaks, and automation tools from postgresql-common.

Speakers:
Linux kernel BoF

Speakers: Martin Pitt, Michael Biebl
systemd provides a range of tools to debug boot and shutdown problems, failing services, and optimize boot time. This "hands-on" talk introduces the most important use cases with some live demos and leaves time for answering questions about your favourite systemd related problems.

Speaker: Jacob Appelbaum
Closing keynote by Jacob Appelbaum

Speaker: Gaudenz Steinlin
The "Lernstick" is a Debian derivative built with Debian Live for Schools in Switzerland. It exists in two variants. The original variant is intended as a mobile learning environment on an USB stick. Students can carry their personal computing environment in their pocket thanks to a Live system installed on the stick. The second variant is called "Lernstick exam environment" and is a stripped down version for "Bring your own device" exams. This version provides a restricted environment for exams which can be carried out using the students own computers without compromising the integrity of the exam. The goal of this talk is to give an overview of the Lernstick system and to show how it leverages Debian and Debian Live to provide a Linux distribution targeted at schools. I will also talk about further collaboration possibilities with Debian (eg. Debian EDU/Soklelinux, Debian Blends). While the Lernstick project has always been Free Software we have only just begun to make the project more accessible to outside contributors. We would like to encourage more contributions in the future. The Lernstick distribution is developed by a unit of the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland. I work part time as a freelancer on the technical implementation of the Lernstick.

Speaker: Thomas Lange
FAI, the Fully Automatic Installation is a network installation system for the installation and configuration of the operation system and all your applications on all your hosts. The whole installation only takes a few minutes without any interaction necessary. The FAI project startet in 1999 as a bare metal provisioning tool for Debian GNU/Linux only. Today it's also used for deploying different Linux distributions like Ubuntu, CentOS, Scientific Linux or Suse on real hardware or virtual hosts. For FAI there's no difference in installing a real machine, a virtual machine, setting up a chroot environment or creating a Live CD. Configuration files are shared among groups of similar computers using the class concept, so you need not create a configuration for every new host. Besides network installations, FAI also supports installation from CD or USB stick and can be extended easily. The talk will show why FAI is the universal deployment tool.

Speakers: Agustin Henze, Ulises Vitulli
In this talk, we will be presenting a Flight Log of our experience on designing, building and hacking around satellite and communication technologies. This process gave birth on Jun 2014 to BugSat-1, aka Tita (greeks `Theta` Θ), a 22Kg Satellite carrying, between others things, six Debian On-Board computers in charge of dealing with the satellite's Payload and Flight Mission. We will be diving through the technology hacked to make Debian able to cope with high latency bandwidth, and also we'll be introducing ddpatch, a debian package minimalization tool intended to optimize communications throughput. Enjoy!